Review: Val Caniparoli's 'Swipe' steals the show in Smuin Ballet's spring program

Even before the curtain rose on Smuin Ballet's run at the Novellus Theater in the company's spring season in San Francisco last weekend, all three choreographers on the bill had told us something fundamental about their work.

Val Caniparoli's "Swipe" gave us a sassy name loaded with meaning -- everything from stealing to swabbing to passing over. Beijing-trained Ma Cong, calling his dance "Through," delivered a word that functions like a bridge connecting one thing to another with movement. Both artists chose titles that follow a trend toward terse, muscular names, names like Taste, Fresh and Apple.

By contrast, the late Michael Smuin named his 2006 ballet "Symphony of Psalms" after the Stravinsky choral music from the 1930s that he used. Even though the work is only six years old, it has a title harkening back to an era when ballets followed music's lead and echoed dance's ancient links with religion.

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The program began with the seamless, often impish ingenuity of "Swipe," a West Coast premiere, which puns seven ways to Sunday-- it swipes movement, especially African steps. It swipes dance motifs -- seaweed arms from the "The Little Mermaid," semaphoring from "Artifact Suite" and the pert bounces from "Apollo". It swipes the air, the body and floor with body parts, and by association, it swipes the music: Gabrielle Prokofiev, grandson of the great Russian composer Sergei, stole and brilliantly remixed his own "String Quartet No.2." The dance got under way in a circle, starting with calisthenic arm thrusts that arched the back, as though the group were performing West African dance boiled down to cool abstraction. The five men and women then seamlessly morphed into line patterns, exits and entrances, returning several times to the circle, as to a touchstone.

Terez Dean danced the fast, undulant and hybrid movement with impeccable timing, flawlessly shifting from one movement idiom to another. She and partner Christian Squires danced as equals, performing different steps together, joining in lifts, one never dominating. Then Jonathan Mangosing swiped the floor in a beautiful and mysterious solo, caterpillaring himself off stage backward. John Speed Orr swiped the spotlight in a finale of gorgeous dancing.

"Swipe" is a work that requires ballet's precision, the curve and attack of earthborne steps and the relaxed ease of walking, and the dancers packed it with silky attack and a nuance that put them at a new level of fluency. Difficult but masterfully crafted work serves them well.

On the surface, "Through," a premiere, might seem to be of the same order as "Swipe." Cong is the resident choreographer of the Tulsa Ballet and, like Caniparoli, a hybridizer, taking from various idioms to forge a contemporary ballet. But Cong, with a pastiche of music compositions by Ryuichi Sakamoto that became increasingly schmaltzy, and despite obvious talent, lacks Caniparoli's capacity to layer. He tends toward the sentimental and superficial, like Smuin, but unlike Smuin, the pas de deux are mechanical and virtuosic, not emotive, reducing "Through's" abundant circles, lifts and leaps to pyrotechnics. While the rich action was always moving somewhere, it lacked the depth that makes us feel the human poetry of motion.

Poetry, by contrast, is what Smuin conjured in the best moments of "Symphony," with its group processional and images of sacrifice: an upside-down cross made by a dancer's body, a dancer held up with her legs in extreme second position and another clamped to the back of her partner, echoing "Carmina Burana" and "Prodigal Son".

Overhead hung what appeared to be two diaphanous boulders, as though the world were upended. And except for the odd turtlenecks worn by the men that were more fitting for a hootenanny, this dance made us feel the solemnity of a world upside down with sorrow and the promise of going on.

SMUIN BALLET

Performing Val Caniparoli’s “Swipe,” Ma Cong’s “Through” and Michael Smuin’s “Symphony of Psalms”When and Where: May 18-19 at Lesher Center for the Arts in Walnut Creek; May 23-27 at Mountain View Center for the Performing ArtsTickets: $49-$62, 925-943-7469 for Walnut Creek, 650-903-6000 for Mountain View, or www.smuinballet.org